Monday, June 3, 2013

Let's Review: Five Most Popular Posts in May 2013

Here are the top five posts on the LX Designer blog for the month of April. Since learning requires reflection, I thought we could reflect on what we learned from the most popular posts over the past month.

In this post I talk about Social Presence Theory and share results of a study indicating a positive relationship between social presence and online instruction. The study also noted that social presence is not about frequency of participation. Social presence is about a social context, online communications, and interactivity. I believe LX designers should understand social presence when designing virtual and social learning in order to increase participation.

On-boarding new employees is a major undertaking for many organizations. In fact, for most training departments, on-boarding is most of what it does. A lot of money is invested in on-boarding new employees, but there are staggering statistics that show that all of this time, energy, and effort is largely wasted.

Microblogging allows for streams of information to be posted to groups in the context of a specific team or project, rather than posted for everyone to see. This allowed project teams to see only information related to what they are work on (if they choose). It also increases awareness of team members of tasks that are being worked on and what progress is being made.

I find this study an important step in discovering a way of working outside of email and share drives that make actually help work teams to work more efficiently together, especially remotely.

This topic is a departure from my normal musings. I ran the Colfax Half Marathon on May 19, and the race was a big focus for me in May. So I wrote about it. In this post, a share some of the wildlife I see on my trail runs.